Angry Millenial Generation armed and dangerous

As part of the grieving process following a tragedy, Americans always want to talk - and talk, and talk. Too bad we tend to get distracted and talk about the wrong things.

Ruben Navarrette

As part of the grieving process following a tragedy, Americans always want to talk - and talk, and talk. Too bad we tend to get distracted and talk about the wrong things.

It happened again after the shooting spree in Aurora, Colo., that left 12 dead and 58 wounded.

There is an important issue to sort through. But you won't catch a glimpse of it on cable television, or hear it mentioned on talk radio. There is no appetite for this dialogue, because it hits too close to home. The first thing we do after a shock such as this is try to put these terrible events at arm's length by blaming someone or something that we consider foreign to our world.

It's hard to focus on what is important when we're distracted by causes and agendas. Within a day of the shooting, gun control advocates had seized upon the horror in Aurora to try to spark a national conversation on limiting the sale of firearms. They did so despite the fact that Colorado has - in the post-Columbine era - pretty strict gun laws, and these measures didn't stop 24-year-old James Holmes from allegedly stockpiling weapons and ammunition and firing upon dozens of innocent people in a movie theater. Many gun enthusiasts went over the top, responding with the absurdity that the mass shooting could have been avoided if the theater patrons had been armed and able to defend themselves. Why not take the body count and triple it?

We also get sidetracked by politics, especially in an election year. After the shooting, liberals were itching to blame their ideological nemesis - the tea party. ABC News' Brian Ross added fuel when he went on air without the facts and suggested - incorrectly, it turned out - that the assailant was a member of the Colorado tea party. That was only 180 degrees off the mark. When the narrative came unraveled, liberals suddenly lost interest in doing something they shouldn't have done in the first place: politicizing the tragedy.

Here's what we should be talking about. Despite the insistence of psychologists and other experts that these kinds of mass killers don't fit a "profile," this isn't entirely true. More often than not, they're young men.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were 18 and 17, respectively, when they killed 13 people and wounded 24 others at Columbine High School in 1999. Seung Hui Cho was 23 when he killed 32 people and wounded 25 others at Virginia Tech in 2007. And Jared Lee Loughner was 23 when he killed six people and wounded 14 others, including then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., in Tucson.

Reared on violent movies and even more violent video games, and having grown up in a culture where guns are glorified and readily available, the Millennial Generation is armed and dangerous. Most often the children of baby boomers and now between the ages of 20 and 31, some Millennial men are angry and alienated. Not a good combination. They're outliers who see themselves at war with society and feel the need to escape into a fantasy world where they instantly become famous for doing evil deeds.

As the father of a 5-year-old boy who loves superheroes and video games as much as the next 5-year-old boy, I'm shocked at how violent and dark that genre has become. Am I supposed to believe that years of exposure to this sort of thing won't desensitize him to violence?

It's probably not a coincidence that Holmes, a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado at Denver, directed his rampage at those attending a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises" - the latest installment in the Batman series. Holmes, who had a Batman mask and poster in his apartment, colored his hair and referred to himself as "the Joker." Of course, the movie didn't cause the violence in the theater. But years of exposure to movies like it might well have set the stage.

It's no wonder that we'd rather blame guns or the tea party. Not everyone owns a gun, and relatively few people belong to the tea party.

What if the problem goes deeper? The scariest thing about this horror film is that there could be more sequels yet to come.